Overall, the paintjob was a lot of fun. I’m eternally grateful that they etched the outline of the Gurren dan logo and the flame motifs into the parts so I didn’t have to paint them freehand. Otherwise, that would have gotten messy.

I couldn’t think of what to do with the gun so, in the end, I pretty much left it as it was.

*That* logo! The original actually had the shades on the logo as being coloured white, but I decided to paint it black.

A closeup of the eyes. The same technique which was used on C.C and Mina was applied here. For those interested but too lazy to look up the tutorial in the Mina project, here’s a quick recap.

First, paint the whole eye white. I use enamel paint for this part to make cleanup easier if I make a mistake. All other parts use acrylic paints

Next, outline the eyelashes on the upper and lower part of the eye. Careful not to make the line too thick or you’ll end up with a goth look.

Then draw the outline of the eyes using black ink and then paint the area which will be the pupils in the base colour of the eyes.

This part is actually 2 steps in 1. First, paint the iris using black ink. Be careful to make sure that they are placed correctly, or else you will end up with a crosseyed figure. After that, paint the upper half of the eye black. that gives the feeling of shadow within the eye.

Here;s a closeup of the eyes so you can see the upper area after it’s painted black. for the final steps, I add an extra line of a lighter version of the basic eye colour to make a “u” line on the pupil and add a dot of white paint for the glistening of the light on the eyes.

Anyways, back to the regular gallery.

I must also confess that myself and misfortune made rather common bedfellows during the build of this kit. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the problems I faced while I was building Yoko:

The jacket parts didn’t fit together properly so I had to heat them and bend them closer together before filling the gap with putty.

The rifle was bent, so I had to heat it up and bend it back into shape.

before I added a second peg to the legs for stability, Yoko fell over several times, damaging the paint job each time…

I sprayed varnish on the rifle to protect it from picking up paint when I put the parts together, but the varnish reacted badly for reasons unknown. In the end I had to strip the paint off back all the way back to the resin and repaint the whole section again, starting with the primer…

The right eye was a messy job which required 2 attempts before I was satisfied.

The masking tape I was using damaged a part of my jacket paint job when I was masking it from repairing the paintjob for the hair. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it not been for the fact that they paint used for the jacket was a custom mix which i didn’t save as I won’t be using much. So I had to mix up another batch…

Front and back shot.

One thing which I quite like how it turned out were the shades. In the original pic given in the box, Yoko had a set of transparent orange shades molded. Unfortunately, they decided not to give those out in the final product so all we got was a regular resin part. But it would have been boring to paint it just block orange, so I tried to do something a little different.

Using my airbrush I sprayed just the outer edge of the upper part of the shades yellow and the lower part orange. The result was a fading in effect which I think worked really well for the the shades.

It doesn’t come out so well in these photos but you can just about see a difference in tone between the top and bottom half of the shades.

And a bit of a pervy shot to finish!

I guess now I can start thinking about what I’m going to do next. Maybe I’ll do something Geass related. Afterall, the second season just started!

@ Dancing Queen: I have noticed that alot of companies seem to ignore the older versions of Yoko. There are a fair few PVC kits either out or on the horizon, but they’re all of the younger “vs tepparin” version. I have the kotobukiya resin of that form too, but I don’t feel like doing a second yoko straight off the bat.

@ Lu-k: yeah. Unfortunately, my skill level doesn’t go that high yet. But i’m still improving. I may get there eventually!